Deborah Denno quoted in U.S. News and World Report about Missouri’s execution of Michael Worthington, which went as planned after Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon denied clemency and the U.S. Supreme Court turned down a stay, despite recent concerns expressed about botched executions.
“It’s a mistake to conflate the criticisms with lethal injection with the death penalty itself,” says Deborah Denno, a Fordham University law school professor who has been studying lethal injection protocols for more than two decades. “Conflating the two has always been a problem on both sides.”
“It’s the biggest irony that people’s hypocrisy about lethal injection is one of the issues that is making these executions botched,” Denno says. “They want to have the so-called medical procedure because they can’t face the fact that they’re killing people and the punishment that is most humane [firing squad]most resembles something that is real.”
Read the entire U.S. News and World Report article.